Climate change and the operation of power: intersectionality, dispossession, and knowledge politics in pastoral communities

This paper employs a feminist political ecology (FPE) framing to show how adaptation processes result in shifting intersectional subjectivities that reshape peoples' relationships to resources and communities. Drawing on cases of pastoralists affected by conservation efforts in Kenya and India, we argue that these shifts create marginalisation while also offering possibilities to challenge existing, gendered subjectivities. We show how maladaptive outcomes result from systemic and deliberate processes, exemplified through loss of land access and control, knowledge politics, and changes in social relations. Using FPE illustrates how top-down adaptation becomes maladaptive and fails, but also offers opportunities to counter marginalisation.